


Thoughts From the Pear Orchard

by GreyBauer



Category: Original Work
Genre: Communism, Custody Arrangements, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Farmhands, Height-Ruled World, Magical-Realism, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Short Story, sibling dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 06:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4424261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyBauer/pseuds/GreyBauer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a family history of solid, 3-foot tall C-class city workers behind her, Daphne’s genes give no warning that she’ll grow past the 63-inch ceiling on her family home. </p>
<p>She does by the time she's sixteen. Everyone cares more than they should, and no one knows what to make of it. </p>
<p>Daphne simply makes do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thoughts From the Pear Orchard

Her father’s oldest brother, Mathias, is an impressive 7 feet 10 inches when he stops growing, just shy of the Tallest Person record but well within his genetic projections. He’s taken from his biological family and reassigned to a height-appropriate F-class family at six, after breaking the three-inch allowance built into C-class architecture.

Her mother is the product of two tall B-class citizens, but a massive growth spurt at ten leaves her towering over her family by more than a foot. Her family is alternately ecstatic and terrified about her height -- at four feet, their daughter is now slotted for agricultural work, blacksmithing, or child care, rather than administration, medical research, or robotics like the rest of the family. All her possible futures help her escape the city, but required heavy physical labor, which none of her family have done before.

Her mother’s work in the family orchard, Pear Orchard 29-NE, is short lived -- she retains her B-class family’s talent for administration and takes over the community tradepost for the ailing Mrs. Higgins within a year of her marriage. Orchard 29-NE isn’t extensive, which means her father’s able to cover the work her mother leaves undone.

Both sides of the family bear genetic markers for class-crossing height. Daphne’s genes give no warning that she’ll grow past the 63 inch ceiling on her family home, but she does by the time she’s sixteen.

No one knew what to make of it. Daphne simply makes do.

* * *

“I’m thinning the south rows today,” she says over breakfast. “Which one of you wants to be my spotter?”

“Me,” Melina says, her boosting cushions puffing as she bounces in her seat.

“You can’t even see over the table, how are you gonna spot?” Linus says, knife clattering against his plate as he drops it to get at his jam-covered biscuit.

“You can barely see out the window either, Linus. What are you, three feet tall?” says Briony.

“Shut up! You’re only three inches taller.”

“Three and a half, shortstack.”

“Well you’re a -- an inch-stealer! You took all the good genes in the womb,” says Linus, pointing finger almost knocking over his milk.

“That’s not even how twins work --”

“Guys,” Daphne interrupts, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I just need a spotter.”

“Daphne, tell him that’s not how twins work.”

“Is so.”

“Is not -- Daphne, tell him.”

“Guys,” Daphne tries again.

“That’s not how twins work, dummy,” says Melina, shrill in Daphne’s ears. She pinches her nose tighter and leaves her toast on her plate.

“What do you know, you’re four,” says Linus.

“And a half!”

“That doesn’t even count.”

They continue like that as Daphne finishes her glass of milk, collects her dishes, and makes her way into the kitchen, neck stooped to avoid dragging her scalp along the ceiling. Her mother stands in front of the window with her hands on the counter, sandwich bread and cold chicken for lunch forgotten in front of her.

Daphne sets her plates in the sink, trying not to let them clatter. She and her mother stand in dead air between concrete walls, waiting for each other to start a conversation.

“I’m trimming the south rows today,” she says, easing sounds into the silence, “I could use you as a spotter.”

Through the kitchen window, Daphne hears chickens cluck in the yard, and Mr. Higgins’ new cow moo on the next farm over. Her siblings continue to bicker at the table, and Melina’s got the high, quavering voice that says tears are imminent.

Her mother stands there, saying nothing.

“I’ll take Linus,” Daphne says, pushing away from the counter. Her fork rattles against her plate in the sink. “Full light’s coming fast. You need to get into town.”

In the other room, Melina lets out a wet-sounding wail, and Briony shouts at Linus for making the youngest cry. Daphne’s halfway out of the kitchen to fix it when her mother says, “We need to do something about your height.”

Daphne thinks about pear trees, ladders, and all the work to be done, and says nothing.

* * *

Orchard 29-NE isn’t extensive, which means her father’s able to cover the work her mother leaves undone. It’s hours in trees much taller than he is, and eventually he gets tired of moving the ladder to reach the top-fruit and starts climbing the trees instead.

One day the branches don’t hold him, and he falls fifteen feet from the top of a tree and snaps the lower portion of his spine on a pear-filled wheelbarrow. Daphne’s the one to find him.

The Major Medical division fixes him. He’s in a full body cast for weeks, and her working hours are spent in his hospital room.

While he’s in the cast, one of the sutures along his spine festers, which is Minor Medical’s jurisdiction. Minor Medical has a waitlist three weeks long and doesn’t catch it. Her father passes.

They don’t meet quota that year.

* * *

Three days into thinning, Daphne’s bouncing knee rattles the table and coffee sloshes out of her mother’s mug. Her knees have never been high enough to upset the table before.

Linus and Melina continue with breakfast. Daphne, Briony, and her mother do not.

“Briony,” her mother says, careful, “take your siblings out.”

Briony looks from her mother to Daphne under her bangs.

“I’m not even done,” Linus whines, “You said I could have extra bacon if I didn’t pick the spinach out my eggs.”

“The bacon will be here when you get back.”

“It’ll be cold!”

“Mom, let them finish,” Daphne says. “I’ll go get a towel and clean it up.”

“Do as I say,” her mother says, like the back of a hand hitting flesh.

Briony hesitates, but in the end all three go.

Her mother sits, elbows and clasped hands supporting her down-turned head, breakfast dishes forgotten in front of her. Daphne looks at the door and taps her fingers on her elbows.

“I’m sorry about your coffee. I’ll clean it up before I go--”

“Forget the coffee,” her mother breathes. Daphne’s shoulders draw tight.

“You’ll have to make dinner for your siblings tonight.”

“You’ll be late?”

“Yes.”

Daphne waits for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t.

“Can I ask why?”

“The tiller on the Boyson’s farm broke yesterday and they’re coming in for parts. I won’t be able to talk with the Housing Bureau until that’s finished.”

Daphne closes her eyes. “You don’t need to talk to the Bureau. I told you, it’s fine.”

“We have to do something about your height.”

“There’s nothing we can do about my height,” she says, not for the first time. “It’s height, it just is.”

“There’s gene therapy --”

“It’s not in my genes. The screenings would have found it. Just leave it, Mom.”

Her mother’s lips tighten, and she lays her palms flat against the table.

“Then we need to do something about the house.”

“I’m never in here anyway --”

“You’re going to hurt your back,” her mother says, and the sit for a moment with the implications of that statement.

“I didn’t hurt my back heaving bushels last harvest, or the one before that, or the one before that.”

“I’m not discussing this. Pick Health or Housing, I don’t care which, but I’m going to one of the two tomorrow.”

“Since when does anything the Bureaus do help,” Daphne asks.

She and her mother sit in dead air between concrete walls, ignoring second conversation they’re having.

“The state’s been keeping us afloat for years, Daphne. I wouldn’t have work without the state.”

“There’s always work here.”

“The work here doesn’t feed us.”   
“I don’t know, Mom, pears seem like food to me.”

Her mother presses her hands into the tabletop until her fingertips turn white. “The orchard isn’t everything, Daphne. We need more than just pears.”

“Dad didn’t think so.”

When her mother slams her palm on the table, it’s fast and sharp. The dishes rattle, and a few drops of her coffee slosh out of the cup again. Daphne flinches, but she doesn’t apologize this time.

Her mother is very quiet when she says, “Leave him out of this.”

“Like you always do?”

Her mother is staring at her, more stone than flesh.

“I want a decision by tomorrow morning.”

“You won’t get one.”

Her mother thins her lips, and Daphne walks away before they can circle back to the start. She’s got work to do.

From the plate left out on the table when she comes in late the next night, her mother has decided the Bureaus can wait another argument.

* * *

Anything farms produce above quota is the farm-holder’s to keep, in accordance with Joint Writ E.E.785 from the Agricultural and Resource Allocation Bureaus. Bartering is strictly prohibited, and citizens are routinely encouraged to trust the state to provide. No one talks about what to do if the state doesn’t provide.

Daphne knows how many pears a chicken, a gallon of milk, a new ladder, or even an hour of time are worth before she turns ten. She makes sure her siblings know too. The state’s care is rarely helpful, and often misplaced.

* * *

“I need help at the tradepost tomorrow,” her mother tells her over a late dinner. It’s chicken soup -- Melina is sick, which means they eat what she can stomach since that’s all there’s time to make.

“Briony’s helpful.”

“Briony’s keeping your sister’s fever reasonable. I need you.”

“Linus is also helpful.”

“Linus is weeding the vegetable patch because he dumped earthworms in your sisters’ beds.”

Daphne can’t argue with either of those points, nor with the need for a second person to load chicken feed and flour into Mr. Higgins’ monstrous cart. The bags are sometimes taller than her mother.

The next day, long before first light, she flops into the back of the Higgins’ cart and shuts her eyes.

When she wakes up, Mr. Higgins has deposited them in front of the Housing Bureau, a four-story brick edifice three miles past the tradepost. Her mother is already halfway up the steps.

* * *

Daphne watches her mother collect forms, fill boxes, and signlines for an hour before she knows how she feels, and doesn’t walk home even when she fixes a name to the feeling. She’s supposed to be fertilizing the east end of the orchard today.

Instead, she stares at a stack of paper three inches thick on the clerk’s desk as the sun sinks low in the sky. The top half inch has been completed in the intervening hours -- the rest are requisition forms and detailed inquests into the state of their farm, from housing condition reports to annual yield statistics to familial labor distributions, indexed by month.

They are meant to fill out less than a quarter of the stack independently; the majority must be completed under state supervision during a round of four inspections.

“I’m sure you understand that the state can’t give preferential treatment to any of its citizens, regardless of the singular circumstances,” the clerk says. “If your orchard your orchard were hyperproducing, we might be able to offer a more… flexible accommodation, as part of an additional-hands reclassification.”

Daphne makes note of that.  

“As it stands now,” the clerk continues, “the state’s assessment is that your orchard is fallowing.”

That’s a blatant lie. “Our orchard’s only thirty years old --”

“Daphne.” Her mother’s hand clamps onto her elbow.

“No -- our yields have been steady since I was born. The orchard’s not --”

“Daphne, shut your mouth.” Her mother’s fingers tighten enough that she feels her forearm start to throb.

Daphne shuts her mouth. She can feel the edges of her mother’s nails just shy of breaking skin.

“There are two options the state can offer you to resolve your daughter’s height problem,” the clerk continues. “The most efficient is to redesignate your daughter to D-class and fill her vacancy in your household with a similarly productive, unassigned C-class child as soon as possible.”

Her mother blinks, breathes shallowly for a moment, thinking about her own childhood. “And the other option?”

“Genetic recombination.”

“I don’t want gene therapy,” Daphne says. The clerk and her mother lock eyes and ignore her, something steely passing between them.

“Recombination,” the clerk says, holding her mother’s stare, “usually requires a considerable investment from the household of the individual. In your case, that may not be required.”

“In my case?”

“An over-reproductive family with a failing orchard and a recently missed quota look a certain way to the assessment board.”

Her mother’s spine snaps straight.

“You may want to look that way, ma’am.”

“Excuse me?”

“The state’s resource allocation for experimental procedures, even reliable ones like genetic recombination, is needs-based.”

A moment passes.

“Do you understand,” the clerk asks.

Her mother stares at the woman across the desk, then nods. Both shift back from the counter.

They move on to scheduling the first wave of inspections on the house, the clerk takes the top half-inch of forms for processing, and her mother holds the uncompleted two and a half inch stack under her arm as they make their way into the falling dusk.

They walk the six miles back to their farm in silence. At midnight, when she can hear her mother’s even breathing through the door, Daphne takes the wheelbarrow from the barn and starts the fertilization she missed that day.

If she has to prove the orchard’s fertile, the trees will need the nitrogen.

* * *

Once the orchard is thinned, pruned, and trimmed, it maintains itself through bloom and growth. Aside from regular fertilization and irrigation maintenance, things settle into a holding pattern until harvest.

The first three inspections come in these calm months. That Daphne is prohibitively busy on each of the three days is far from coincidental. There is always work around the orchard, despite her mother’s opinion, from weeding the garden to spraying for bugs to helping other farms bring in their harvests. Daphne cans preserves. She milks cows in the morning. She mucks out stables and repairs cart wheels and weaves harvest baskets for the coming rush.

Three months slip by with very little conversation.

The first inspectors are local and concerned with the integrity of the house. Daphne knows them all by sight, though not by name -- average B- and C-class people from the village. The day they come she walks eight miles to the Martin’s sheep pasture, where they’re sheering for summer. C-class is forbidden to work with animals over three feet tall, which a majority of the ewes are; the Martins take her into the paddock and have her hold down sheep regardless. No one reports her, and they send her home with a basket full of wool. Her mother takes it to the tradepost the next day, and she never sees it again.

The second inspection is populated predominantly by E-class men, and they look scaled up against the familiar backdrop of fields and houses. They mill around the front of her house, all too broad to fit through the door, and their hands dwarf the glasses of lemonade Briony passes out as refreshments. They ask Daphne about her tendency towards ear infections as a child, if her broken wrist healed properly, when she started menstruating, whether her stool is firm or soft and if it passes regularly, if she feels any weakness in her hips when she runs (like her mother does in the heat), if she’s prone to mood swings or unexplainable sadness, if she masturbates, if she’s ever been pregnant. They tell her she will not be punished if she has broken any regulations, but write down her answers precisely, asking her to repeat words if she speaks too quickly. They ask her these questions while her siblings are in ear shot, because her mother is in the village and Daphne has to watch them. They ask her siblings a shorter list of similar questions, and she wishes the door was made of concrete, not wood.

The third inspection comes as the pears are beginning to grow. Her mother wants Daphne to give A-class microbiologists and B-class state administrators a tour of the orchard when the roof of the barn had leaked in the last summer storm and the harvest baskets were all rotting. Daphne wakes her siblings before dawn that day and they set out for the stream just past the Higgins’ pasture instead. She carries Melina the whole way. They eat the state’s wild blackberries and fish in the state’s stream and catch seven of the state’s trout between them. They return too late for the inspectors to see the fish strung together by the gills.

* * *

August comes, and the orchard is a mess of laden, bending limbs.

Daphne’s skull feels too tight and her throat feels too hot as she looks at their single ladder, leaning against the wall of the barn. Melina and Linus trudge back and forth in the pre-dawn light, setting a ring of baskets around each tree on the west side of the orchard, where the fruit always ripens first.

Her mother is in town at the Resource Allocation Bureau and won’t be back before dark (the last of the tomato harvest in, and Briony’s in charge of dinner, which means endless fruit for everyone). Her mother hasn’t seen fit to requisition a second ladder for this year’s harvest.

“I can just climb,” Briony says.

“No one’s climbing.”

Her sister lets out a huge yawn. “One person’s not gonna be enough, Daph. I’m careful.”

“No.”

They stand in the barn, looking at the ladder and ignoring the wheelbarrow in the corner until Linus’s scraping footsteps are at the door again. Briony looks from her sister to her twin, and as Linus passes, Briony picks up the other side of the basket and helps him carry it out.

Daphne can’t quite bring herself to touch the ladder.

When Briony returns, a half-awake Melina trailing behind her, Daphne tells her to pick the low fruit. “Nothing over seven feet high,” she says. “Not even if it’s just a finger-length away.” She tries to be more stone than flesh, like she’s seen her mother do.

Her sister nods, and Daphne hauls the ladder out to the first tree to get to work on the top-fruit. Her sister’s grown more than two inches this season -- she’s over three and a half feet tall now. Seven feet isn’t too high. Seven feet is safe enough.

Daphne picks top-fruit until it’s too dark to see the branches in front of her face, just in case.

* * *

The fourth inspection comes on the fifth day of harvest, and Daphne tries her best to ignore it. The baskets are filling more slowly, which is normal -- after day three, harvest is a hunt through branches for slow ripeners, and the bulk of the frantic work is done.

Her mother is not giving yield estimates over dinner this year. Daphne hopes she’s hit quota. Hyper-productivity seems far enough out of reach to be laughable.

Her mother is not on another ladder somewhere in the rows, picking with the speed of long practice. Her siblings are there in her place, climbing through the low branches (no higher than seven feet, please, no higher, please let them be safe). Instead, her mother is on the front lawn of the house entertaining an eight foot tall F-class army general and a two foot tall A-class geneticist. What they are there to inspect, Daphne doesn’t know. She continues twisting pears off their branches, and tries to drink a glass of water each time she drags another full basket in.

She’s by the water pump near their house, filling her cup and running cool water over her neck, when she hears a scream from the north-east corner of the orchard. There are two seconds between the scream (it’s Briony’s, she knows it is, she heard it just like that when they were both just children) and Linus’s shaking cry for help, in which she hopes she’s hearing things.

She’s not. Daphne takes off toward the sound, relaying the call to her mother in the loudest voice she can.

Orchards are hard to run. The ground looks even and flat, but roots snarl up out of the dirt, the grass is muddy if the trees have been recently watered, and the wheel ruts between the rows are about five inches different from top to bottom. She shouts for her siblings, hoping to hear a sound-off, but the canopy dampens sound almost as well as the humidity. She runs blind for a full minute and a half, sidebag of pears bouncing against her hip, before she hears the sniff-hiccup of Melina crying and sees her sister halfway behind a tree.

“Are you okay,” she says, dropping down in front of the youngest, and she knows it’s too loud, and she knows she’s jostling the poor girl too much while she’s looking for injuries. Her baby sister’s sweet face is splotchy and red, and it sounds like there’s a rattle in her chest when she breathes.

“It’s ok sweetie,” she says, hugs the tiny four-year-old close. “You’re ok, we’re ok.”

Her sister’s hands fist in her shirt, but Daphne unfurls them, kisses Melina’s forehead too quickly. “Mom will be here in just a minute, I promise baby -- I need you to point me, ok? Can you point me? Where’s your brother?”

Melina points what looks like due north, looks ready to cry harder, and Daphne has the presence of mind to realize this could be very bad -- the top fruit on the north side had needed more time, and if her sister was brave and dumb enough to try for it, she could have snapped her neck in the fall.

“Stay right here, sweetie, right by this tree ok,” she says, and takes off again. “Linus! Briony!”

The trees all look the same, uniform white trunks and too many pears, harvest baskets scattered through identical rows. She’s dead in the center of the orchard and she can’t see sun at the end of any rows, just green and more green and no siblings. There’s no sound, she can’t hear Melina once she’s three rows further in. She shouts and can’t tell if it travels far enough to do any good. .

And then there’s her brother, hand on a tree trunk two rows up, face just as red and splotchy as Melina’s had been.

“She fell, Briony fell,” he says, “There’s blood.”

Daphne shouldn’t feel this cold, after that run in this kind of heat.

“Where,” she says, and Linus turns around and takes her through two more rows of trees.

There’s blood, a lot of blood, some on Linus and most of it on Briony, but it’s not too much. There’s the shining white of a snapped bone jutting through Briony’s shin, but it’s not her spine and it’s not her neck. She’s breathing, Daphne can see her breathing, hard and pained, and she’s never felt so relieved in her life.

* * *

Broken tibias are the Major Medical division’s job. Daphne makes sure the doctor hands her a full course of antibiotics before they take Briony home a day and a half later.

* * *

“We hit quota,” her mother says, tossing a stack of papers in front of her daughter.

Daphne’s spine tenses at the plurality. Her mother had nothing to do with making quota.

“We overshot quota by a full sixteen bushels. It’s the highest yield 29-NE’s ever had,” her mother says. The tendons in her throat are defined, and her lips are thin. “We’ve been designated as hyper-productive.”

Good, Daphne thinks. Good. That means more hands, more help. No more falls. No more hospitals.

“Do you realize what you’ve done,” her mother says.

Daphne looks at her blankly.

“Do you understand what this is going to do to your siblings?”

She is confused. “What?”

“I’ve been trying -- for _months_ , I’ve been trying to get the resource allocation that would get you the recombination treatment, and you’ve fought me at every turn. Is this why?”

“What are you talking about?”

“ _This_ , Daphne,” she says, flipping pages in the stack with one hand and jamming her finger into the page with the other.

It’s an occupancy report on their farm. It lists two new C-class individuals coming in, and a D-class female being reassigned.

“What?”

Her mother looks at her with the same steely eyes she held the clerk with at the Housing Bureau. “Our family is more than an orchard, Daphne. Our family is us, together, in whatever form that takes -- including genetic recombination.”

She stares at the page. The reassigned D-class female is listed with her ID number.

“They said housing was flexible if we were hyper-productive. That we could negotiate something --”

“For new hands. Not for us. Things don’t change for us.”

There is a pause. She looks up at her mother.

“I thought you just hated me. Because of dad.”

Her blinks and breathes shallowly for a moment. “What?”

There is a pause.

“I’ll get the treatment.”

Her mother’s spine bends, and she sits, head in her hands.

“It’s not that simple. We don’t have those resources.”

“Then the resource allocation --”

“It’s need based. Need-based, or full investment.”

She and her mother sit in dead air between concrete walls, having the second conversation they’ve been ignoring.

“And we’re sixteen bushels over,” Daphne says.

“And we’re sixteen bushels over."

 


End file.
